Is there anything I won’t put on video? Probably a few things, this is not one of them though. A minor discussion about the Aiwa with myself, complaints that my $10 multimeter probes have fallen apart due to insufficient/fake strain relief and of course some random cat at the end.

The red probe was almost ready to fall off, and the black one actually separated when I left the leads hanging over the side of the workbench. Excellent strain relief on those things! I suppose that’s what you get for buying cheap probes, although I wasn’t particularly impressed with the way they’d decided to retire.

Fortunately, I’d already ordered a replacement multimeter. It’s a VC97, or something along those lines, costing about $40 Australian delivered. One nice improvement is automatic ranging, so I won’t have to fiddle around quite so much finding the correct voltage or resistance range. At least that’s the theory!

Unfortunately, having no working multimeter meant the Aiwa Mega-CD repairs were on hold for the moment. I’d been investigating a simplified power-supply arrangement that wouldn’t have to pass through the battery board. One of those boards had suffered some rather strange physical damage, with several cracks despite being mounted safely inside the unit. How it ended up in that condition is anybody’s guess!

I’d also been looking at other Aiwa units that might make useful parts donors. There was a Japanese model that looked remarkably similar to the Mega-CD-equipped CSD-GM1, apart from the charcoal-coloured casing and the missing game and karaoke hardware. The example I’d found appeared to be a couple of years newer, around 1996 rather than 1994, so I was rather interested in whether any of its ordinary boombox components might be compatible.

Thanks to NJRoadfan for identifying the Aiwa CSD-GM1’s cousin as being the Aiwa CSD-EX110 or CSD-EX111 in the US. There’s certainly no shortage of different model numbers to keep track of with these things! Shipping an entire boombox from Japan probably isn’t going to be cheap either, but we’ll see what turns up.

I’ve also got a proper ESR meter on the way from the United States, which should be rather useful once the repairs get moving again. You can tell I’m getting the hang of iMovie 11 now that pictures are appearing. Oh yes, there’s some circuit bending photos too, perhaps a hint at an upcoming video!

And of course, the random cat. Wouldn’t be a proper McRetro production without something completely unrelated making an appearance, would it?